U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning delivered hundreds of thousands of classified documents that he found troubling to WikiLeaks, and in 2013 was sentenced to 35 years in prison for espionage and theft. In 2014, Manning, who is transgender, was granted the right to be legally recognized as Chelsea Elizabeth Manning. President Barack Obama commuted her sentence and she was released from prison in 2017.

Bradley Manning was born on December 17, 1987. Years later, the Crescent, Oklahoma native, who is transgender,was granted the right to be legally recognized as Chelsea Elizabeth Manning.After joining the Army and enduring harsh bullying, Manning was sent to Iraq in 2009. There she had access to classified information that she described as profoundly troubling. Manning gave much of this information to WikiLeaks and was later arrested after her actions were reported to the U.S. government by a hacker confidant.

On July 30, 2013, Manning was found guilty of espionage and theft, but not guilty of aiding the enemy. In August 2013, she was sentenced to 35 years in prison. Serving time in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Manning was able to receive hormone treatments, although she has faced other restrictions around gender expression. On January 17, 2017, President Barack Obama commuted Manning's remaining sentence, and she was released from prison on May 17, 2017.

Bradley Manning was born in Crescent, Oklahoma on December 17, 1987. Years later, Manning announced that she is transgender and hence would be legally recognized as Chelsea Elizabeth Manning.

As a child, Manning was highly intelligent and showed an affinity for computers. Though presenting as a boy during her youth, Manning dressed as a girl at times in private, feeling profoundly alienated and fearful about her secret. She was bullied at school and her mother also attempted suicide at one point. (Her father would later paint a more stable picture of the household.)

After her parents split, Manning lived during her teens with her motherin Wales, where she was also bullied by peers. She eventually moved back to the United States to live with her stepmother and father, who was a former soldier. There the family had major clashes after Manning lost a tech job, and at one point Manning's stepmother called the police after a particularly volatile confrontation. The young Manning was then homeless, living in a pickup truck for a time and eventually moving in with her paternal aunt.

Manning joined the Army in 2007 at the behest of her father, girded by thoughts of serving her country and believing that a military environment might mitigate her desire to exist openly as a woman. She was initially the target of severe bullying there as well, and the besieged, emotionally suffering Manning lashed out at superior officers. But her posting at Fort Drum in New York had some happy moments. She began dating Tyler Watkins, a Brandeis University student who introduced Manning to Boston's hacker community.

A U.S. Army photo of Bradley Manning. (Photo: By United States Army [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

In 2009, Manning was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer in Iraq, an isolated site near the Iranian border. Her duties as an intelligence analyst there gave her access to a great deal of classified information. Some of this informationincluding videos that showed unarmed civilians being shot at and killedhorrified Manning.

Manning reportedly made her first contact with Julian Assange's WikiLeaks in November 2009 after having made attempts to contact The New York Times and TheWashington Post. While at work in Iraq, she proceeded to amass information that included war logs about the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, private cables from the State Department and assessments of Guantnamo prisoners. In February 2010, while on leave in Rockville, Maryland, she passed this informationwhich amounted to hundreds of thousands of documents, many of them classifiedto WikiLeaks. In April, the organization released a video that showed a helicopter crew shooting at civilians after having confused a telephoto lens for weaponry. Releases of other information continued throughout the year.

Upon her return to Iraq, Manning had behavioral issues that included attacking an officer. She was demoted and told she would be discharged. Manning subsequently reached out to a stranger online, hacker Adrian Lamo. Using the screen name "bradass87," Manning confided in Lamo about the leaks. Lamo contacted the Defense Department about what he had learned, which led to Manning's arrest in May 2010.

Manning was first imprisoned in Kuwait, where she became suicidal. After returning to the United States, she was moved to a Marine base in Virginia. Manning was kept in solitary confinement for most of her time there, and was unable to leave her small, windowless cell for 23 hours each day. Deemed a suicide risk, she was watched over constantly, sometimes kept naked in her cell and not permitted to have a pillow or sheets.

Even when a psychiatrist said that Manning was no longer a danger to herself, the conditions of her imprisonment did not improve. When word of these conditions spread, there was an international outcry. Manning was transferred to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas in 2011, where she was allowed to have personal effects in a windowed cell. In January 2013, the judge in Manning's case ruled that her imprisonment had been unduly harsh and gave her a sentencing credit.

In June 2010,Manning was charged with leaking classified information. In March 2011, additional charges were added. These included the accusation of aiding the enemy, as the information Manning had leaked had been accessible to Al-Qaeda.

In February 2013, Manning pleaded guilty to storing and leaking military information. She explained that her actions had been intended to encourage debate, not harm the United States. She continued to plead not guilty to several other charges while her court martial proceeded. On July 30, Manning was found guilty of 20 counts, including espionage, theft and computer fraud. However, the judge ruled she was not guilty of aiding the enemy, the most serious charge Manning had faced.

On August 21, 2013, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison.Manning was dishonorably discharged, reduced in rank and forced to forfeit all pay.

The Obama administrationmaintained that military and diplomatic sources were endangered by Manning's leaks. Even with Manning's conviction, the debate continues as to whether she shared dangerous intelligence or if she was a whistleblower who received too harsh of a punishment.

On the day after her sentencing, Manning announced via a statement on the morning talk showTodaythat she is transgender. "As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female. Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible," Manning said.

How Chelsea Manning sees herself. By Alicia Neal, in cooperation with Chelsea herself, commissioned by the Chelsea Manning Support Network, April 23. 2014. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

After filing a court petition, Manning was granted the right in late April of 2014 to be legally recognized as Chelsea Elizabeth Manning. The army made hormone therapy available to the former intelligence analyst, who continued to be held at Fort Leavenworth, though other restrictions were imposed, including measures on hair length. During the summer of 2015, Manning was reportedly threatened with solitary confinement for prison rule violations that her attorneys asserted were veiled forms of harassment by authorities.

In May 2016, Manning's attorneys filed an appeal of her conviction and 35-year sentence stating that No whistleblower in American history has been sentenced this harshly, and describing the sentence as "perhaps the most unjust sentence in the history of the military justice system.

On July 5, 2016, Manning was hospitalized aftera suicide attempt. She faced a disciplinary hearing related to her suicide attempt and was sentenced to solitary confinement. OnOctober 4, 2016, while spendingthe first night in solitary confinement, she attempted suicide again.

Support for her release continued to grow and in the waning days of President Barack Obama's presidency, 117,000 people signed a petition asking him to commute her sentence. On January 17, 2017, Obama did just that, cutting shortManning's remaining prison sentence, which allowed her to be freed on May 17, 2017. (An administration official said she was not immediately released in order to allow for time to handle items like procuring housing.) Manning served seven years of the 35-year sentence, with some Republicans, including Speaker of the HousePaul Ryan, critiquing the act of clemency.

Manning has shared her perspectives on gender identity, imprisonment and political affairs via a series of columns written for The Guardian. Four months after her release from prison, Manning appeared in the September 2017 issue of Vogue magazine, featuring photographs by Annie Liebovitz. Manning posted a photograph from the article, in which she is wearing a red bathing suit on the beach, writing: Guess this is what freedom looks like.

My goal is to use these next six months to figure out where I want to go, Manning explained in the Vogue interview. I have these values that I can connect with: responsibility, compassion. Those are really foundational for me. Do and say and be who you are because, no matter what happens, you are loved unconditionally.

In early 2018, Manning announced she was challenging Maryland's two-term U.S. Senator Ben Cardin in the Democratic primary. Positioning herself to the left of her opponent, whom she dismissed as an establishment insider, she called for a reduced police presence in the streets and championed the idea of a universal basic income.

For Manning, who has lived in Maryland since her release from prison, the choice to run for office in "the place that I have the strongest roots and ties to out of anywhere else" was an easy one. However, her bid was considered a long shot against a popular incumbent, particularly after a pair of late-May tweets that sparked concern about her well-being.

In late February 2019, Manning revealed that she was fighting a subpoena to testify before a grand jury about her interactions with WikiLeaks. She was taken into custody March 9, after a federal judge found her in contempt for her refusal to cooperate, and spent a month in solitary confinement in a Virginia prison before being moved into its general population.

In April, after Assange was arrested in London, it was reported that Manning's subpoena for grand jury testimony stemmed from her alleged online conversations with Assange around the time she forwarded the classified documents to WikiLeaks.

Manning was released from custody on May 9 and immediately summoned to appear before a new grand jury. However, she refused to comply once again and was sent back to jail on May 16.

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Chelsea Manning - - Biography ... - BIO

In his final days in office, President Barack Obama granted executive clemency to over 500 federal inmates. Among them isChelsea Manning who was convicted for stealing government property, violation of theComputer Fraud and Abuse Act, among other things. While there are so many people who considered Manning as a traitor, there are others who see her as a hero for whistle-blowers.

Manning served in the US army before her conviction, and after that, she turned to politics and activism.

Popular as Chelsea Elizabeth Manning, it was actually as Bradley Edward Manning that she was born on December 17, 1987, in Crescent, Oklahoma, U.S. She was brought up by her parents, Brian Manning who served in the US Navy and Susan Fox as their second child.

Growing up for her was not very easy, especially as her parents were both alcoholics and as a child, she was mostly taken care of by her elder sister, Casey Manning who is 11 years older than her. More than that, she was described as having a very controlling father.

Mannings childhood would continue to be rocky after her parents marriage suffered a divorce in 2000 and soon afterwards her father married again while she left the house with her mother and sister. In 2010, they moved to Wales to be close to her mothers family.

For her educational background, Chelsea Manning had her elementary education in the United States before attending the Tasker Milward Secondary School after her family moved to Wales.

She soon returned to the United States in 2007 as a result of an illness and moved in with her father. She would later work as a developer for a software company before she moved to the Montgomery College where she spent only a semester and quit after failing her exam.

See Also:Who Is Alan Dershowitz, What Is His Relationship With Trump and O.J Simpson

As stated, it was as Bradley Edward Manning that she was born, a boy. Bradley revealed to friends when he was still a child, that he was gay. As he struggled with how to get a job and settle down, his father encouraged him to think about joining the army, something he later decided to do as a way of resolving his gender identity disorder.

Chelsea Manning enlisted into the army in 2007 and was trainedatFort Leonard Wood, Missouriwhere he had to struggle withbullying for being different in every way possible. He was later posted to Iraq.

On 18 February 2010, WikiLeaks released a document known as the Reykjavik 13, leaked to it by Manning who got access to them while serving in the army. What would be the most damning release from Manning was a video on the Baghdad airstrike which it named Collateral Murder. The video captured American helicopters firing on a group of men before later turning the fire on a van that stopped to help the wounded. Two children who were in the van were injured in the process while their father was killed.

The video drew a lot of criticism against the United States and it was one of the main things that made WikiLeaks very popular.

Some more documents were later released by WikiLeaks, thanks to Manning. The new released was tagged the Afghan War Logs and Iraq War Logs which amounted to over 500 thousand documents. These were classified military documents that covered activities between January 2004 and December 2009.

Manning leaked some more documents including the United States diplomatic cables leak which placed the country in a diplomatic crisis with the world. The documents revealed US foreign strategies and how the country takes advantage of its embassies as a part of a global espionage network.

Another leak made by Chelsea Manning that was very damning was the Guantnamo leaks which gave the world an insight into what was really happening in Guantanamo Bay. The release showed that there are 172 prisoners in the detention camp without any hope of either a trail or a release, as well as an 89-year-old Afghan villager and a boy of 14. It also revealed that there were British nationals also held in the prison.

The entire documents leaked by Chelsea Manning became the largest set of classified documents to ever be released.

On May 27, 2010, Manning was arrested in Kuwait and placed on suicide watch. She was charged with a number of crimes including violation of the Espionage Act and aiding the enemy. In 2013, she pleaded guilty to 10 of the 22 charges she was charged with. Although the Maximum sentence for her crime was 90 years, the government sought to have her jailed for 60 while her lawyers asked for a maximum of 25. Nonetheless, she was sentenced to 21 to 35 years in prison.

In the last days of the Obama Administration, Manning who had had her gender transition in prison was granted pardon after serving 7 years behind bars of her maximum 35 years.

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Who Is Chelsea Manning, What Did She Do Or Leak?

The night Chelsea Manning was released from Fort Leavenworth military prison in Kansas, her first steps as a free woman were being filmed. It was May 2017 and she had just served nearly seven years of a 35-year sentence for disclosing 750,000 classified documents to Julian Assanges WikiLeaks. It was nerve-racking, says the man who filmed her, the British artist and documentary-maker Tim Travers Hawkins, from his apartment in New York. I knew it was the money shot, if you like. It was such an important historical moment.

Hawkins kept his camera rolling, assembling XY Chelsea (the title is Mannings social media handle) from more than 250 hours of footage. He was there when Mannings legal team jetted her out of Fort Leavenworth on a private plane to a safe house, a cabin in the woods, to readjust to life outside prison. He filmed her hello world first steps into public life after being invisible for seven years: a New York Times interview and a Vogue photoshoot with Annie Leibovitz. He was there when Manning made a bid to run for the Senate less than eight months after release. But it is the unguarded, private moments in the film that strike home, as she finds her identity, becoming Chelsea Manning.

At the time of her arrest in 2010, Manning presented as male: Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old US army intelligence analyst and tech geek responsible for the biggest leak of secret material in history. In the army photograph, Bradley looks like a kid dressing up in a soldiers uniform. Manning came out as trans the day after her sentencing her lawyers advised against it, arguing it would complicate her case, but she had had enough of secrecy. In prison, she successfully sued the government for access to hormone treatment, but was held in all-male facilities and forced to have her hair cut into a short conservative mans style. Manning said guards would walk in on her changing her shirt or putting on her bra.

The happiest Manning ever looks in XY Chelsea is at the safe house as her young lawyer, Chase Strangio, styles her hair for her social media profile picture. Afterwards, Manning giggles, wondering if theres too much boobage in the shot. You could see how exhilarated she was just being able to use a mirror, Hawkins says. They didnt have mirrors in the prison, just beaten metal sheets.

In October last year, Manning underwent gender confirmation surgery. An early edit of the film included footage of her convalescing but, after speaking with the trans community, Hawkins decided it wasnt appropriate to include it. One thing I really wanted to avoid with the trans narrative was this kind of idea that transition represented a before and after. The idea that she only became a woman because she had surgery, or that she wasnt a woman before.

Manning grew up in a small town in Oklahoma. Her childhood was unstable emotionally both her parents drank heavily and split up when she was 12. She had a complicated relationship with her father and, tellingly, the film doesnt give us a Manning family reunion, although Hawkins interviews her Welsh mum, who speaks with difficulty after a stroke. In the film, while testing lipsticks, Manning explains that she enlisted in the army on a whim at 19 running away from gender dysphoria: I was trying to man up I saw it like going cold turkey, but you cant stop being who you are. She stops, looks in the mirror. This is a fantastic shade.

When Hawkins conceived the film, Manning was not meant to be in it. An artist-activist, Hawkins was making an experimental digital art piece about prisoners who were unfilmable due to the restrictions of their captivity. He sent Manning a letter in prison, and she agreed to take part, sending him her prison diaries.

During her sentence, Manning was repeatedly held in solitary confinement and subjected to conditions described by the UNs torture envoy as cruel, inhuman and degrading. In 2016, feeling depressed and hopeless, she twice attempted suicide. By this point she had given up on a miracle and expected to serve out every one of the 35 years of her sentence. Then, in a surprise move, President Barack Obama commuted it. The feeling among everyone was that this was something that would never happen, says Hawkins.

While Manning was still in prison, one of her close friends kept a sign above her desk, a reminder for their telephone calls: Dont rush Chelsea. Remember shes weak. Did Hawkins worry that filming would heap pressure on someone already in a fragile mental state? Absolutely. One thing we were really clear on as a production team was that Chelsea had been let down throughout her life. The last thing we wanted was to be the latest people to let her down. We were extremely aware not to push it and to give her space.

He adds: I felt my role in this film was not to try and do a Wikipedia page of everything that has happened in this case. I wanted to try to find an emotional connection and an emotional truth. A lot of times that meant just being gentle and just being there and present and allowing things to unfold.

That softly-softly approach will disappoint anyone expecting the film to be a tell-all. What does Manning think about WikiLeaks publishing stolen Democratic campaign emails in 2016, boosting Donald Trumps election chances? (As president, Trump has banned transsexuals from the military.) The Mueller report? Or the rape allegations against Assange in Sweden? We are left none the wiser. Manning has never spoken publicly about Assange, and she keeps schtum in XY Chelsea. She is writing a memoir, due out late next year, which may reveal more.

People will be frustrated, I think, watching the film because there are all sorts of burning questions about her relationship [with Assange] that people want answered, Hawkins admits. By way of explanation, he restates one of Mannings justifications for her continued silence that the two never met in person. Their communication was pretty limited and based on anonymous chat, says Hawkins. Assange was not this big figure when she was in communication with him. He was pretty much an unknown. He was this kooky guy who was known in the tech circles.

Besides, Hawkins says he wanted to wrestle the narrative from WikiLeaks and re-centre it on Manning. He makes the point that, by the time she contacted the site, Manning had already decided to turn whistleblower. I think the way that Chelsea approached the disclosures was incredibly intuitive, rather than calculated in perhaps the way that [Edward] Snowden approached his disclosures. I feel it was almost a more kind of punk rock act of direct action. Shes like that. She is a kind of punk rock figure for me.

XY Chelsea is out on Friday.

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Chelsea Manning director: 'She's a kind of punk rock figure ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A federal judge found former U.S. soldier and WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning in contempt of court and ordered her back to jail on Thursday for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury, a law enforcement official and her legal team said.

Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning is seen speaking to reporters outside the U.S. federal courthouse in this frame grab from video taken shortly before she entered the coourthouse to appear before a federal judge regarding a federal grand jury investigation of WikiLeaks in Alexandria, Virginia, U.S. May 16, 2019. REUTERS/Courtesy of NBC News

Manning was convicted by Army court-martial in 2013 of espionage and other offenses for leaking an enormous trove of military reports and State Department cables to WikiLeaks while she was an intelligence analyst in Iraq.

Former President Barack Obama later reduced Mannings sentence and she was released in May 2017.

Manning was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury hearing evidence collected by prosecutors who have for years been investigating WikiLeaks, and who recently unsealed a criminal indictment against its founder, Julian Assange.

Manning refused to testify and earlier this year was jailed for 62 days for contempt of court.

U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga sent her back to jail on Thursday and ordered that, if she does not comply with the subpoena, after 30 days she will be fined $500 a day.

The fine would go up to $1,000 a day if she continues to refuse to testify after 60 days, the law enforcement official and a spokesman for her attorneys said.

Manning was taken immediately to a local jail in Alexandria, Virginia.

Attempting to coerce me with a grand jury subpoena is not going to work. I will not cooperate with this or any other grand jury, Manning said before entering the federal courthouse for the hearing on Thursday. Facing jail again, potentially today, doesnt change my stance.

The indictment against Assange alleges that he conspired with Manning to try to crack a password stored on U.S. Defense Department computers connected to a classified government data network. Mannings lawyer, Moira Meltzer-Cohen, said after the hearing that her client would not back down.

We are of course disappointed with the outcome of todays hearing, but I anticipate it will be exactly as coercive as the previous sanction which is to say not at all, she said.

U.S. prosecutors publicly released the indictment against Assange after he was evicted from Ecuadors London embassy, where he took refuge in 2012 fearing extradition to the United States or Sweden.

Assange is now serving a 50-week British prison sentence for jumping bail. Both U.S. and Swedish authorities are seeking his extradition.

Reporting by Mark Hosenball; Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Phil Berlowitz and Tom Brown

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Chelsea Manning to ask court to quash new grand jury subpoena ...

Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who provided secret military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, was sent to jail again on Thursday after refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating the organization, which publishes leaks online.

Ms. Manning was jailed for similar reasons in March, but was released last week when the term of the grand jury that had served her with a subpoena in January expired.

This month she was served with another subpoena to appear before a new grand jury. At a closed hearing on Thursday, she told a federal judge that she would not answer questions, and he ordered her to be sent back to Alexandria Detention Center in Virginia, either until she agrees to testify or until the grand jurys term expires in 18 months.

The judge, Anthony J. Trenga of United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, also ordered Ms. Manning to be fined $500 for every day she remains in custody after 30 days, and $1,000 for every day she remains in custody after 60 days.

We are of course disappointed with the outcome of todays hearing, Moira Meltzer-Cohen, a lawyer for Ms. Manning, said in a statement. But I anticipate it will be exactly as coercive as the previous sanction which is to say not at all.

Prosecutors have granted immunity to Ms. Manning for her testimony, but she has said that she had already answered pertinent questions during a court-martial in 2013, and will not cooperate with a grand jury no matter how long she is detained.

As a general principle, I object to grand juries, she said in a video statement after being released last week. Prosecutors run grand juries behind closed doors and in secret without a judge present. Therefore, I declined to answer any questions.

Prosecutors said the jail time was meant to persuade Ms. Manning to testify. After the hearing on Thursday, G. Zachary Terwilliger, United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said that Ms. Manning was being treated like any other citizen who might have relevant information, The Associated Press reported.

All we want is for her to truthfully answer any questions, he said.

But lawyers for Ms. Manning have argued that jail time is pointless and punitive because she refuses to answer questions no matter what.

I would rather starve than change my principles in this regard, Ms. Manning said to Judge Trenga on Thursday.

Both the subpoenas served to Ms. Manning by the Eastern District of Virginia this year came after prosecutors inadvertently disclosed in November that Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, had been charged under seal in that district.

The investigation into Mr. Assange is part of a criminal inquiry that began during the Obama administration. Mr. Assange evaded the investigation for seven years by sheltering in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he continued his activities with WikiLeaks, including working on the release of thousands of Democratic Party emails stolen by Russian hackers during the presidential campaign of 2016.

But Ecuador suspended the citizenship it had granted him and kicked Mr. Assange out of the embassy last month. He was arrested to face allegations in the United States that he had conspired to hack into a Pentagon computer network in 2010.

During her 2013 court-martial, Ms. Manning admitted sending secret documents to WikiLeaks, including hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and Army reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. She also confessed to interacting online with someone who was probably Mr. Assange, but she said she had acted on principle and was not working for WikiLeaks.

A military judge sentenced Ms. Manning to 35 years in prison in 2013. She served seven years, including pretrial custody, by the time President Barack Obama commuted the remainder of her sentence in 2017. It was the longest amount of time that any American had served in prison for leaking government secrets to the public. Ms. Manning, who was known as Bradley at the time of her conviction and transitioned to life as a woman while in a prison for men, was lauded by some free speech advocates as well as gay and transgender activists while she was incarcerated.

Ms. Manning spent 63 days in jail when she was detained earlier this year, including 28 days in solitary confinement conditions, her lawyers said in a statement on Thursday.

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Chelsea Manning Ordered Back to Jail for Refusal to Testify ...

In a move press freedom advocates and progressive critics decried as an "outrageous" and "unprecedented" escalation of a prolonged government harassment campaign, a federal judge on Thursday ordered U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning back to jail for refusing to testify before a secretive grand jury and imposed a $500 fine for every day she is in custody after 30 days.

"It is a point of pride for this administration to be publicly hostile to the press. It is up to the press to stand up for themselves, to stand up for the practice of journalism, and to stand up for Chelsea." Moira Meltzer-Cohen, attorney for Chelsea Manning

If Manning refuses to comply with the grand jury subpoena after 60 days, the fine will increase to $1,000 per day.

During a court hearing on Thursday, Manning told Judge Anthony Trenga that she has no intention of giving in to government pressure.

"I would rather starve to death than to change my opinion in this regard," said Manning. "And when I say that, I mean that quite literally."

Manning's imprisonment Thursday came exactly one week after she was released following a 62-day stint in jailincluding a month in solitary confinementfor refusing to testify before a grand jury that, as the Guardian reported, "is presumed to relate to the criminal prosecution" of WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange, who is currently fighting the Trump administration's attempt to extradite him to the United States.

"This is unprecedented," read a tweet from Manning's official Twitter account.

BREAKING: the US governments harassment of whistleblower and activist Chelsea Manning is intensifying. The fines they are threatening her with are unprecedented. Read her legal teams statement and retweet this til it breaks https://t.co/5QR5bnhchi

Evan Greer (@evan_greer) May 16, 2019

This is outrageous. https://t.co/2GvhUK0My6

Naomi Klein (@NaomiAKlein) May 16, 2019

Moira Meltzer-Cohen, an attorney for Manning, said in a statement Thursday that while she is "disappointed" with the judge's decision, she expects "it will be exactly as coercive as the previous sanctionwhich is to say not at all."

"In 2010 Chelsea made a principled decision to let the world see the true nature modern asymmetric warfare," said Meltzer-Cohen. "It is telling that the United States has always been more concerned with the disclosure of those documents than with the damning substance of the disclosures."

"The American government relies on the informed consent of the governed, and the free press is the vigorous mechanism to keep us informed. It is a point of pride for this administration to be publicly hostile to the press," she added. "It is up to the press to stand up for themselves, to stand up for the practice of journalism, and to stand up for Chelsea in the same manner she has consistently stood up for the press."

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'This Is Unprecedented': Judge Orders Chelsea Manning Jailed ...

Two months ago, the federal government summoned me before a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia.

As a general principle, I object to grand juries. Prosecutors run grand juries behind closed doors and in secret, without a judge present. Therefore, I declined to cooperate or answer any questions. Based on my refusal to answer questions, District Court Judge Hilton ordered me held in contempt until the grand jury ended.

Yesterday, the grand jury expired, and I left the Alexandria Detention Center. Throughout this ordeal, an incredible spring of solidarity and love boiled over.

I received thousands of letters, including dozens to hundreds of them a day. This means the world to me, and keeps me going.

Jail and prisons exist as a dark stain on our society, with more people confined in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world. During my time, I spent 28 days in solitary confinement--a traumatic experience I already endured for a year in prison before.

Only a few months before re-incarceration, I received gender confirmation surgery. This left my body vulnerable to injury and infection, leading to possible complications that I am now seeking treatment for.

My absence severely hampers both my public and private life. The law requires that civil contempt only be used to coerce witnesses to testify.

As I cannot be coerced, it instead exists as an additional punishment on top of the seven years I served. Last week, I hand-wrote a statement outlining the fact I will never agree to testify before this or any other grand jury. Several of my closest family, friends and colleagues supported this fact. Our statements were filed in court. The government knows I can't be coerced. When I arrive at the courthouse this coming Thursday, what happened last time will occur again.

I will not cooperate with this or any other grand jury.

Throughout the last decade, I accepted full responsibility for my actions. Facing jail again, this week, does not change this fact. The prosecutors deliberately place me in an impossible situation: I either go to jail, or turn my back on my prisons.

The truth is, the government can construct no prison worse than to betray my conscience or my principles.

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Chelsea Manning's Statement on Release from Jail and Second Grand Jury Subpeona

WASHINGTON Ever since she was publicly identified as the source who had disclosed a huge trove of military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks in 2011, Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst, has been a polarizing cultural figure called a traitor by prosecutors, but celebrated as an icon by transparency and antiwar activists. Her life story, and her role in one of the most extraordinary leaks in American history, has been told in news articles, an Off Broadway play and even an opera. But while she spoke at her court-martial and has participated in interviews, Manning herself has not told her own story, until now. Manning is writing a memoir, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in the winter of 2020, the publisher announced Monday.

Manning was convicted in 2013 and sentenced to 35 years in prison, the longest sentence ever handed down in an American leak case. After her conviction, Manning announced that she was a transgender woman and changed her name to Chelsea, although the military housed her in a Fort Leavenworth prison for male inmates. She had a difficult time there, attempting suicide twice in 2016, before President Barack Obama commuted most of the remainder of her sentence shortly before he left office in January 2017. In the meantime, WikiLeaks published Democratic emails stolen by Russian hackers during the 2016 presidential campaign, transforming its image from what it had been back when Manning decided to send archives of secret files to it.

Manning reappeared in the news this year, refusing to testify before a grand jury as federal prosecutors continue to build a case against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder. Assange, currently in custody in Britain, is fighting extradition to the United States for a charge that he conspired with Manning to try to crack an encoded password that would have permitted her to log onto a classified computer network under a different persons account rather than her own, which would have helped her mask her tracks better. She was jailed for two months for contempt over her refusal to answer questions about her interactions with Assange, then freed because the grand jury expired. But she has already been served with a new subpoena prosecutors obtained from a new grand jury and is expected to be jailed again soon.

Below are edited excerpts from a conversation between Manning and Charlie Savage, a New York Times reporter who has written about her court-martial and her time in military prison.

Tell me about your book.

Its basically my life story up until I got the commutation, from my birth to my time in school and going to the army and going to prison and the court-martial process. Its a personal narrative of what was going on in my life surrounding that time and what led to the leaks, what led to prison, and how this whole ordeal has really shaped me and changed me. I view this book as a coming-of-age story. For instance, how my colleagues in the intelligence field really were the driving force behind my questioning of assumptions that I had come into the military with how jaded they were, some of them having done two three four deployments previously. And then also there is a lot of stuff about how prisons are awful, and how prisoners survive and get through being in confinement.

Do you have a title yet?

There is no title yet. I am trying very hard to have some control over that, but none has been decided yet. Noreen Malone from New York magazine worked on it with me. She did a lot of the groundwork in terms of the research, and I did the storytelling, so it was a collaborative effort. Im still going through and editing where she has taken independent sources to help refine my story, fact-check, verify things and provide a third-person perspective in shaping things.

Is it written in first-person or third-person?

It is written in first-person, but there are parts of the book that reference material that are independent of me. Im still under obligation under the court rules and the Classified Information Procedures Act of 1980 to not disclose closed court-martial testimony or verify evidence that was put in the record. Things like that. So I cant talk about that stuff and Im not going to, and so Im trying to keep this and maintain this as more of a personal story. There are parts of it that might reference reports or whatnot but Im just going to say, the media reported this, but Im not confirming or denying it.

Are you going to submit the manuscript to the government for a classified information review?

Were trying our best to avoid the review process. There is a lot of stuff that is not going to be in the book that people would expect to be in there, but rules are rules and we cant get around it. Its more about personal experiences I had rather than anything specific. Im not trying to relitigate the case, just tell my personal story.

So if it ends with you getting out of military prison, youre not going to address your current situation with the grand jury investigating WikiLeaks?

No, were not planning on including that in this current stage. If there is a book that gets into the more juicy details about that stuff, then well probably get around to that after going through a review process, several years down the road from now, whenever the dust settles. But I think this is more about trying to contextualize my story from my perspective rather than get into the weeds of what is in the record of trial, what is in the documents, what the investigation focused on, because were just not able to get into that area.

It sounds like you are a lot freer to talk about your gender identity than the WikiLeaks issue.

Yeah. This is less a book about the case and more a book about trials, tribunals, struggles, difficulties, and overcoming them and surviving. If people are expecting to learn a lot more about the court-martial and a lot more about the case, then they probably shouldnt be interested in this book. But if they want to know more about what its like to be me and survive, then there are reams of information in here. Its much more autobiographical than it is a narrative thriller or crime story or anything like that. I have always pitched this to being very similar to Wild by Cheryl Strayed. Im really opening myself up to some really intimate things in this book, some really very personal moments and much more intimate points of my life that Ive never disclosed before. Youre probably going to learn more about my love life than about the disclosures.

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Im Really Opening Myself Up: Chelsea Manning Signs Book ...

Chelsea Manning was sent to jail again for refusing to testify to a grand jury about WikiLeaks, The Associated Press reports.

This marks the second time since March that Manning was imprisoned for not complying with a grand jury subpoena. A judge ordered Manning back to the womens wing of the Alexandria Detention Center in Virginia until she either agrees to testify or until the grand jury term expires in 18 months.

Manning reportedly told Judge Anthony Trenga that she objected to grand juries in principle. She also argued that she should not be sent back to jail as her previous imprisonment proved that jail time wouldnt cause her to change her mind about testifying. She said shed rather starve to death than change her opinion.

Before entering the federal courthouse, Manning reportedly said, Attempting to coerce me with a grand jury subpoena is not going to work. I will not cooperate with this or any other grand jury.

Manning spent 62 days in a federal jail after refusing to testify and was released earlier this month when the grand jury term expired. A former intelligence analyst for the Army, she was also famously incarcerated after she admitted in 2013 to leaking a vast trove of documents to WikiLeaks. Though she was sentenced to 35 years in prison, former President Barack Obama commuted the rest of her term after she served seven years.

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Chelsea Manning Sent Back to Prison After Refusing Subpoena ...

Manning, who divulged massive amounts of information to WikiLeaks, had her sentence commuted Tuesday by President Obama. USA TODAY NETWORK

ALEXANDRIA, Va. A federal judge ordered Chelsea Manning, theformer U.S. Army intelligence analyst who spent four years in prison for providing classifiedinformation to WikiLeaks, to be jailed Thursday after she refused to cooperate with a grand jury investigation related tothe anti-secrecy group.

"I would rather starve to death than to change my opinion in this regard. And when I say that, I mean that quite literally," Manning said during a hearing Thursday afternoon in federal district court in Alexandria, Virginia, where Manning will be jailed for no longer than 18 months, the maximum term for federal grand juries.

U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga said that Manning refused to testify because of a philosophical objection to the use of grand juries and that Manning has persisted in her refusal.

Moira Meltzer-Cohen, Manning's attorney, said she's disappointed with the judge's decision.She argued that Manning is "famously principled" and jailing her again is useless because no amount of incarceration can force her to relent.

"She is not going to cooperate with this grand jury. She knows it. I know it. Her friends and family know it," Meltzer-Cohen said in court.

G. Zachary Terwilliger, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said he still hopes Manning will change her mind. He declined to answer what steps his office will take if Manning continues to refuse after the term of the grand jury expires.

More: Chelsea Manning jailed for contempt after refusing to testify in WikiLeaks grand jury investigation

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"The only thing that's being asked of her was to answer questions truthfully," Terwilliger told reporters, adding that Manning had been granted immunity from self-incrimination.

Manningwas jailedfor contempt in March after she refused to testify before the grand jury, saying she's against the inquiry and she had already provided the government "extensive testimony" during her prosecution six years ago. She was released last week after the grand jury's term expired.

Prosecutors summoned her to appear again Thursday in front of a new grand jury, though she promised not to cooperate.After she made good on that promise, Trengaheld her in contempt and ordered that she be jailed immediately. She also faces fines of $500 a day if she doesn't cooperate within a month, and $1,000 a day if she still refuses to testify after two months.

Chelsea Manning was jailed for contempt on May 16, 2019 after she refused to testify before a grand jury.(Photo: Alexandria Sheriff's Office)

Speaking to reporters before her scheduled grand jury appearance Thursday afternoon, Manning said the subpoena was simply an attempt to put her back behind bars and relitigate her previous prosecution for leaking classified information to WikiLeaks. She said prosecutors arejust asking her "broad and generic" questions she had already answered.

Meltzer-Cohen argued in court that further incarceration willunnecessarily punish Manning and put her health at risk. Manning, a transgender woman, recently underwent a major surgery and has medical needs that won't be accommodated in the Alexandria Detention Center. Medical staff at the jail aren't trained to address the "post-surgical needs" of a transgender woman, Meltzer-Cohen said.

Terwilliger said medical staff at the jail had already "bent over backwards" to accommodate Manning's medical needs and is fully equipped to do so again. Prosecutorsargued in courtthat they don't want Manning to be jailed, butincarceration will "coerce" her to fulfill her responsibility of testifying before the grand jury. They also said that Manning's criticisms of the use of a grand jury are unfounded.

Manning's attorneys had previously declined to say what information the government is seeking. But last year, federal prosecutors in the same federal district court inadvertently disclosed in court documents that criminal charges had been filed under seal against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

More: Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder, faces US hacking conspiracy charge

The indictment against Assange was filed under seal in March 2018 and was made public last month, when Assange was arrested to face a conspiracy charge in the United States. Prosecutors alleged that Assangeconspired with Manning to steal and publish a large cache of top-secret files from military computers. They saidAssange helped Manning crack a password to access a Pentagon computer system.

Manning's attorneys argued that compelling her to testify isn't lawful, saying grand juries areintended only for investigative purposes and not to prepare for trial in the pending criminal case against Assange.

Complicating the U.S.effort to try Assange is a separate prosecution in Sweden, where investigatorshave reopened a rape case over an incident that allegedly happened 10 years ago. Authorities in Sweden have also sought extradition.

Assange's arrest last month came after nearlyseven years ofself-imposed exile inside the Embassy of Ecuador in London. He was forcibly taken into custody after Ecuadorian officials revoked his political asylum. The 47-year-old Australian national sought asylum in the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he was wanted for questioning in the rape case.

Manning's case has attracted heightened attention because of her status as a transgender soldier. Shewas sentenced to 35 years in prison in 2013 for her role in leaking a cache of classified government material to WikiLeaks. At the time, she was known as Bradley Manning. President Barack Obama commuted her sentence in 2017.

Contributing: Kevin Johnson, Bart Jansen and Kim Hjelmgaard

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Chelsea Manning jailed for contempt after refusing to testify